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Friday, July 21, 2017

The American higher education
system was born in revolution—the Industrial Revolution that reshaped the world
in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.Today, the system is in the midst of another
revolution—the Global Information Revolution—that has implications as great, if
not greater, than its counterpart.The
question before us is fundamental:What
is the role of the public university in this new environment?

The
original American college was dedicated to the classical curriculum of the
Enlightenment.Students were drawn from
the social and economic elite of the new country.Its purpose, as the famous Yale Report of
1829 described, was “the discipline and furniture of the mind.”However, as the Industrial Revolution matured
in mid-century, it became clear that a new kind of educational vision was
needed if the United States was to make the most of industrial
innovations.State governments began to
fund public colleges and universities in order to prepare young people to take
on new careers in engineering, science, and business; to create professionals
in the new social science fields that had arisen due to urbanization; to train
teachers who were needed to educate the children of immigrants who were
flooding into the new industrial cities to work in the mills; and, not the
least, to improve life in rural America and help farmers improve agricultural
production desperately needed to feed the new urban populations.The combination of new professional education
needs and the emerging research mission re-organized the academy around
disciplines, and that, in turn, re-defined the curriculum.

The
first half of the twentieth century saw the fulfillment of the Industrial
Revolution as nations mobilized industry to fight two world wars.The period also saw the beginnings of the
Information Revolution.Radio and
television revolutionized communications and World War II saw the birth of the
computer age that dramatically changed how we relate to information and to each
other.The wars also transformed
society, bringing longstanding political and cultural assumptions to an end and
setting the stage for new global relationships and social identities. The development—and use—of the atomic bomb
challenged traditional international relations and ushered in a new age. In
response, higher education institutions launched a number of curricular
innovations in the general undergraduate curriculum.

After
the Second World War, President Truman, concerned about the stability of
democratic society in the new age, created a Commission on Higher
Education.In its 1947 report, the
Commission noted the global disruption caused by the World Wars and the rise of
atomic weapons.“It is essential today,”
wrote the Commission, “that education come decisively to grips with the
world-wide crisis of mankind.This is no
careless or uncritical use of words.No
thinking person doubts that we are living in a decisive moment of human history”
(p. 6).One result of the wars, the
Commission maintained, was growing internationalism.“In speed of transportation and communication
and in economic interdependence the nations of the globe already are one world;
the task is to secure recognition and acceptance of this oneness in the thinking
of the people, so that the concept of one world may be realized psychologically,
socially, and in good time politically” (p. 16).

The
Commission recommended several major steps to increase the number of citizens
who receive higher education and to ensure that their education prepared them
to live in this dangerous new world.Over
the next few decades, the Commission’s ideas influenced the development of the
nation’s community college system, along with the GI-Bill and state and federal
scholarship and loan programs that greatly expanded the number of high school
graduates able to attend college.It
also stimulated “area studies” programs that increased understanding of the
emerging global economy. The
Commission’s emphasis on adult education stimulated the development of
continuing education programs and adult degree programs.Several states developed new colleges—Empire
State College in New York, the University of Maryland University College, and
Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey are examples—devoted entirely to
educating adults.

The decades that followed the Truman
Commission report saw dramatic changes. Some—the space race and the war in
Vietnam, for instance—reflected a long-term cold war between western
democracies and communist nations.The
Middle East emerged as a continuing cultural, economic, and military hot spot.
The period also saw the youth movement, the fight for civil rights and equal rights, and the invention of the Internet and personal
computing.

In 1995, the National
Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (now the Association
of Public and Land-Grant Universities) received grants from the Kellogg
Foundation to fund another commission to examine the future of public higher
education in this new environment.Over
the next four years, the Kellogg Commission produced six reports designed to help public institutions
revitalize their public missions.The
first five reports focused on the student experience, student access,
engagement with the public, creating a learning society, and the campus
culture.

The final report
explored the need to reinvigorate the partnership—the “covenant”—between the public
and its universities “in a new and dangerous world.”It noted that, as the nation entered a new
century, “the promise of American higher education must be made in a new era
and a completely different world.”It
noted the growing financial inequality in society, the breakdown of old
disciplinary identities, blurring of distinctions between secondary and
undergraduate education, and the surge of new technologies that “may erase the
boundaries between the university and the nation and, indeed the world.” (Restoring the Covenant, p.33)

Higher education plays a unique role. Demand for highly
skilled, socially engaged people is both increasing and changing. In the period
up to 2025, half of all jobs are projected to require high-level
qualifications. High-level skills gaps already exist. Driven by digital
technology, jobs are becoming more flexible and complex. People’s capacities to
be entrepreneurial, manage complex information, think autonomously and
creatively, use resources, including digital ones, smartly, communicate
effectively and be resilient are more crucial than ever. Europe also needs more
high achievers who can develop the cutting edge technologies and solutions on
which our future prosperity depends. In parallel, countering the growing
polarisation of our societies and distrust of democratic institutions calls on
everyone — including higher education staff and students — to engage more
actively with the communities around them and promote social inclusion and
mobility (p.2).

The EU
agenda reflects some of the same concerns as the Kellogg Commission.It listed four “priorities for action”:

What do
these reports, spanning seven decades from the transition from the Industrial
Revolution to the maturation of the global information society, suggest in
terms of next steps for public higher education?The following possibilities reflect some recent
innovations that have not yet been mainstreamed.Many of them assume that universities will
fully embrace information technology to meet the need.They are, at minimum, a starting point for
transforming higher education to meet the needs of the new society that has
emerged since World War II.

A New Relationship
between Schooling and Higher Education

The Truman
Commission was very clear in its proposal to extend universal high school from
12 to 14 years, thus encompassing the first two years of the baccalaureate
degree.The result would be a great
equalizing of educational benefit as suggested by the Kellogg Commission and
ensuring that more citizens leave education with the higher level of
qualifications needed by today’s economy.The rise of online learning over the past two decades has begun to
provide a pathway to this goal.The
following examples suggest the potential:

1.The use of college and
university Open Educational Resources (OERs)—in many cases drawn from online
higher education courses—to empower high school teachers to deepen and enrich
important subjects in their high school classrooms.

2.The use of undergraduate online
(and traditional) courses as “dual enrollment” courses that allow high school
students to simultaneously earn high school and university credit, helping
students make the transition to college more quickly and less expensively.

New Approaches to
the Curriculum

A basic
truth of the Information Revolution is that education is no longer about the
transfer of knowledge from the instructor to the student.Knowledge— in the sense of “content”—is
everywhere.The educational challenge is
not simply knowledge transfer.Instead,
the challenge in the Information Age is to help students learn how to find and
evaluate information, turn it into useful knowledge, apply that knowledge to
solve problems, and evaluate the results.

A key
innovation in this area has been the Community of Inquiry approach.Developed at Athabasca University, it builds
on foundational ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey.As the Athabasca innovators describe it, a
Community of Inquiry is “a group of individuals who
collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to
construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.”

The educational experience is the interaction of three
“presences”:teaching, cognition, and
social interaction.While the model is
certainly facilitated by technology, it can be implemented in any group
learning environment.

New
Inter-Institutional Partnerships

When the
model for our public universities was developed in the 19th century,
physical isolation was a problem.Faculty expertise at all levels had to be on-site for teaching and for
community engagement, if not always for research.This ensured that each institution did its
best to attract faculty who were experts in content areas and research that
mattered most to the local community.But it also left gaps where faculty expertise was not readily
available.Today, we are beginning to
see institutions use information technology to create new relationships across
institutions and across state boundaries to ensure that institutions can bring
the best resources to bear to meet local needs.One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance
(IDEA). http://www.gpidea.org/This consortium of
19 public universities in 18 U.S. states works to develop graduate degree
programs that are delivered at a distance and that include courses taught by
faculty from multiple member institutions.Students enroll at the institution of their choice and receive their
degree from that institution, but take courses from several different
institutions.The goal is to ensure
that, regardless of location, the student will have the benefit of specialized
knowledge and experience from faculty at multiple universities.The program has operated since 1994 and has
become a model for institutional cooperation in this arena.

Another
innovation is the Big Ten Alliance’s CourseShare, which allows students at member
universities to take courses through technology from other member universities.The advantages are described as follows:

Faculty enjoy the CourseShare
program for the chance to collaborate with respected peers at Big Ten Academic
Alliance universities, expand course enrollments with talented students, employ
new technologies, fill curricular gaps, preserve specialized courses, and
strengthen student recruitment efforts. Students enjoy the opportunity to take
specialized courses offered at other Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions
from a distance, eliminating the need to temporarily relocate.

Such
partnerships, be they within a family of institutions or across sectors, offer
institutions opportunities to prepare students for work in areas that may be
new to their home economy.

Inter-Sector
Partnerships

Similar
partnerships are emerging between public universities and other sectors,
especially employers, to ensure that key employee groups have access to
technical and professional education.Examples of these partnerships date back to the 1980s, when National
Technological University (NTU) brought together a network of universities and
engineering companies to offer professional graduate education to company
employees via satellite.NTU was
eventually sold and later integrated into Walden University, a for-profit
educational provider. A more recent example is the Energy Providers Coalitionfor Education (EPCE), a collaborative of 2,500
energy-related companies, government offices, unions, and suppliers whose
employees receive online educational services from four public universities
around the country.

As these
examples suggest, information technology makes it possible for sustainable,
long-term cross-sector partnerships that bring sometimes very specialized
expertise to working professionals over a wide range of companies and
geographic locations.

Internationalization

One obvious
facet of the global information society is that it is, in fact, global.The underlying challenge for higher education
is to prepare students to work as professionals in a global community.However, another facet is that we need to
prepare our international students to be successful in their home
communities.Too often, especially at
the graduate level, higher education serves to encourage the brain drain that
takes talented people away from developing countries.Here, again, we are seeing models designed
to reverse brain drain.A good example
is the “sandwich” doctorate.In this
approach, a faculty member from an international university who wants to earn a
U.S. doctorate will (1) take initial courses at her home institution, (2) move
to the U.S. institution for the second year of course work, and (3) return the
home institution to conduct her research.The result is that the person is able to grow within her home
institution, while creating new research partnerships between the two
institutions.

Mainstreaming
Innovation

The
information revolution has matured considerably over the past two decades.As this posting suggests, there have been
many innovations designed to help institutions be more effective in the new
environment.However, if these are to
help guide the system as a whole in this new environment, they need to become
mainstreamed.We need, for instance,
accreditation standards for multi-institution degree programs, standards for
the mountain of informal credentials—“badges,” etc.—that are being offered by
institutions.We need agreements between
universities and employers for lifelong learning programs that employees take
on new responsibilities.And so forth.The challenge to regional and professional
accrediting associations, higher education institutional membership
associations, and other bodies is to derive from these innovations standards that will encourage
institutions to move innovation into the mainstream of their educational,
research, and service missions.

A New Societal
Engagement

As we
consider these changes, we must also consider a broader, more fundamental
change issue: the nature of the community in which students are being prepared
to live.Many of the early engagement
innovations of the industrial period were designed either to integrate immigrants
into growing urban communities or to “keep’em down on the farm” by making rural
life more appealing in a time when electrification and other services were
attracting people to cities. Today, we
are seeing a dramatic change in our sense of cultural identity.Increasingly, education is not geared to send
young people back to the family farm, the family business, or to take their
place in their home community; instead, the goal is to prepare them for
professions that may require them to move away.As Wendell Berry wrote in a 1988 essay, “According to the new norm, the
child’s destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession
has given way to supersession. . . The child is not educated to return home and
be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and
earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or
community.” (What are People For, p.
162).In essence, many small communities
across the nation are experiencing their own brain drain in the new economy.The three
reports described above emphasize that our public institutions must not only
prepare individuals for professions, but, in the process, prepare them as citizens
for life in a new global society.This requires
a fresh commitment to the community service mission—a mission that interacts
with the teaching and research functions.Our definition of “community” is evolving as a global culture takes
root.Our public institutions must not
only prepare individual students for new professions, but also help local
communities find their way in this new environment and help students develop
their sense of citizenship, both in their home communities and in the broader
geographic and economic communities in which local success is increasingly
tied. This is central to the social purpose of public higher education. It should
be part of the context in which many of the recent innovations are mainstreamed.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Over the past few years, our public
colleges and universities have made great strides in adopting online technology
to extend undergraduate and graduate degree programs to working adults away
from campus.This has allowed adults to
gain the skills and credentials that they need to adapt to the new working
requirements of a maturing global information society.It has also created new revenue streams for
universities to support innovation.Now,
it is time for public colleges and universities to explore how they can use the
same technologies to revitalize their traditional service missions and to
foster true lifelong learning.This
posting will explore some opportunities for online-based lifelong learning as
part of the public university’s social engagement mission.

First, a Look Back

Our public colleges and
universities have their roots in the Industrial Revolution.They were invented to facilitate the changes
that were needed as the country shifted from a rural economy to an industrial
economy.Industrialization stimulated
two big events.The first was
urbanization.Most factories were either
started in cities or created cities around themselves, attracting families from
farms to move closer.The second was
immigration; people came from all over Europe and Asia to find a future in the
new economy.They flooded into the
cities.This caused several
problems.One was a concern that our agricultural
system was not robust enough to feed the growing urban population.A second was the need to educate the children
of immigrants, to make them full citizens in the process.State and federal government responded by
creating new institutions—normal schools—to train the many teachers needed to
educate the new urban children and by creating the Agricultural Extension
Service—housed in the new land grant universities.And there were other issues, of course.Some of these gave rise to new academic
disciplines, things like sociology and social psychology, which found places in
the new universities, along with engineering, business, and applied sciences,
needed to keep the revolution moving ahead.These are the foundations of the system of state colleges and
universities that has dominated education in many of the United States for the
past century and more.

For
the past several decades, these assumptions about higher education have been
challenged as the Information Revolution gained force, bringing with it
powerful social changes.In 2001, the
Kellogg Foundation released reports from a commission that it had charged to
explore the role of higher education in this new environment.The Commission on the Future of State and
Land Grant Universities looked at five dimensions of quality:the student experience, student access,
social engagement, a learning society, and the campus culture.The Commission argued that “our institutions
must play an essential role in making lifelong learning a reality in the United
States.”Noting that technology was now
able to make lifelong learning a reality, the Commission noted, “We are
convinced that public research universities must be leaders in a new era of not
simply increased demand for education, but rather of a change so fundamental
and far-reaching that the establishment of a true ‘learning society’ lies
within our grasp.”The Commission
described several characteristics of a learning society:

·It fosters the habits of lifelong learning and “ensures
that there are responsive and flexible learning programs and learning networks
available to address all students’ needs.”

·“It is socially inclusive and ensures that all
of its members are part of its learning communities.”

·It recognizes that lifelong learning begins with
early childhood development and organizes “ways of enhancing the development of
all children.”

·“It stimulates the creation of new knowledge
through research and other means of discovery.”

·“It values regional and global interconnections
and cultural links.”

·"It fosters public policy to support equitable
access and recognizes that investments in learning contribute to overall
competitiveness and the economic and social well-being of the nation.”

In the years since the report, Returning to Our Root, was published,
higher education has, for the most part, focused its use of information
technology on extending undergraduate and graduate degree programs to students
away from campus.There have been some
efforts in the noncredit arena—development of MOOCs as noncredit courses and
sharing of Open Educational Resources (OERs) – but the greatest innovations,
affecting the most institutions, has been in credit-based programs.Meanwhile, traditional noncredit programs at
many institutions have struggled.

The
challenge for the coming decade will be to explore how information technology
can be used to fulfill the social engagement and lifelong learning challenges
articulated by Returning to Our Roots
and, in the process, to re-imagine the role of public higher education in
sustaining a learning society in an era marked by cultural and economic
globalization.The rest of this piece
will suggest a few starting points.

Re-Imagining Undergraduate Education

While many of the ideas to follow
deal with noncredit and informal learning—the traditional venue of continuing
education units in our universities—I’d like first to describe a key step in
creating a true lifelong learning system:redefining undergraduate education as a launching point for lifelong
learning.In the industrial period,
society gradually expanded primary and secondary education; high school moved
from being a pricey option to a publically funded expectation.We need a similar expansion to prepare
students to succeed—as citizens and professionals—in the new environment.Elements might include:

·A K-14 curriculum that makes the first two years
of higher education—combining traditional “general” education and introductory
professional/vocational education—free to the student.

·A Year of Service that would take place between
the twelfth and thirteenth years, so that young adults begin their higher
education with a better understanding of the working world and the needs of the
community in which they live and work.This might include work in state/national parks, hospitals, libraries and
other community organizations with the service helping to offset the cost of
the next two years of instruction), or it might include a practicum with a
local employer or service in the military, Peace Corps, or other societal
contribution.

·Periodic internships or practica in the
student’s chosen vocation/profession as part of the undergraduate experience,
so that students become familiar with the expectations of the field in which
they are studying.

·Involvement of alumni to help students prepare
for their careers.

·As students complete their undergraduate
programs and move into their careers, the institution should help them make the
transition by providing noncredit seminars and access to an online learning
community for transitioning professionals.The learning community would give the new professional access to
faculty, alumni, and other transitioning students to help solve problems and to
learn about new developments in the field.

Noncredit Lifelong Learning in the Online Learning Era

Sadly, many of the less formal
kinds of lifelong learning that defined “continuing education” for much of the
20th century have faded in recent years, due in no small part to the
new emphasis on delivery of credit programs to off-campus adults.However, if our public universities are to
fulfill their public mission, we need to take a fresh look at how our
institutions, our research centers, and our faculty engage key constituencies
and ensure that citizens can continue to benefit from learning throughout their
lives. In recent years, this function has taken a back seat to innovations
around online degree programs.However,
these noncredit and sometimes nonformal learning opportunities are key to the
vision of the public university in a learning society.New kinds of extension services can use
information technology in ways that complement delivery of online credit
programs.Here are some examples of how institutions can
re-invigorate and expand noncredit engagement for lifelong learning in the new
era:

·Career
Maintenance While alumni may eventually return for a graduate certificate
or degree, the university should also maintain contact with them by offering
short noncredit courses and resources to keep them informed about new knowledge
and skills in their professions.This is
the traditional role of continuing professional education and could involve
traditional mechanisms, such as workplace learning events and conferences.In the new environment, it might also include
an online learning community that gives recent graduates access to noncredit
webinars, TED-type video lectures, Open Educational Resources, and less formal
engagement with faculty, alumni, and other recent grads.

·Learning
Communities In an earlier posting, I described how a combination of online
technologies could be combined to create ongoing learning communities.These could be organized around professions
or disciplines to help alumni and others in a field to maintain their
knowledge, to learn about new research and technology applications in their
field, and to find solutions to problems by sharing experiences with colleagues
and faculty in an online environment.Learning communities can become a meeting ground where faculty and
practitioners learn from each other through webinars, videos and other OERs,
and messaging.:

·Open
Educational Resources for Schools Throughout the industrial age and early
in the Information Revolution, land grant universities used distance education
to extend learning opportunities to high schools.The University of Nebraska was a leader in
developing high school level correspondence courses—which were often adopted
and used by other land grants—to ensure that high school students had access to
key courses.From the 1960s through the
1980s, universities used television to deliver learning resources that high
school teachers could use in their classrooms. Today, information technology
allows us to create libraries of Open Educational Resources that teachers can
incorporate into classes at all levels.Development of OER collections (perhaps, initially, taken from an institution’s
online credit courses) and collaborations among institutions to share their
libraries with local schools is an easy way to extend new learning
opportunities to students while building relationships with K-12 schools.Such a service must be accompanied by
professional development programs that help teachers learn how best to
incorporate OERs into their own curricula—another application of the Learning
Community model.

·Open
Educational Resources for Industries and Professions Universities can also
build stronger relationships with the industries and professions that they
serve by creating OER collections that provide nonformal professional
development and research transfer opportunities for companies, professional associations,
government agencies, and community organizations.

·Preparing
for the Third Act Americans are living longer today than in the past.Increasingly, as a result, one of the
challenges of lifelong learning is to help older adults prepare for retirement
and what follows.That might be a second
or third career or a commitment to community volunteerism or turning a hobby
into a vocation.This may be
accomplished through noncredit short courses like those sponsored at more than
100 universities by the Osher Foundation’s Lifelong Learning Institutes.

·Social
and Cultural EngagementA Learning
Society is not just interested in work.Other kinds of participation in the community—through the arts and other
cultural and avocational activities—are important to building sustainable
communities.Public Broadcasting—now perhaps
better described as Public Media—has been a leader in this function for many
decades.Today, public media is not
limited to a single broadcast channel.Many stations have multiple cable channels as well as online
resources.In short, there are many ways
to engage lifelong learners in the arts and to help them develop their own
creative and avocational skills.

Our
public colleges and universities have a long history of helping learners
develop many aspects of their lives.Experience shows that a commitment to lifelong learning and a learning
society is not a one-way street.Engagement at this level also helps faculty identify unmet needs, which
leads to new research, new teaching, and, ultimately, fresh engagements.

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Recently, I met with members of a
local fraternity as part of a series of sessions sponsored by State College
Borough.A representative of the police
was there to tell fraternity members about the laws and ordinances—under-age
drinking, noise, public urination, etc.—that tend to dog the party-oriented
fraternities located in our residential neighborhood. My role was just to introduce them to the
neighborhood and to encourage them to participate in the life of our community.
However, as I walked to the meeting, I
realized that the discussion we really needed to have—and for which there is no
venue—is about what is happening in the United States and the world and what it
might mean for their generation.

I
came to State College in 1968 as a junior at Penn State, having spent the first
two years at Shenango Valley Campus in my home town.It was a time of turmoil.Earlier that year, the country had witnessed
two assassinations.In April 1968,
Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking
a series of race riots in large and small communities across the country.Then, on June 6, Robert F. Kennedy died after
being shot while campaigning for President in the California primary.The country, already on edge due to an
unpopular war in Vietnam, was shaken.A
sophomore at Penn State-Shenango, I was working at a fast-food restaurant and had
night-watch duty during the riots.

The
political turmoil was accompanied by social revolution.African-American rights, gay rights, women’s
rights, the youth revolution—all converged on Baby Boomers as they entered
their college years.Woodstock
punctuated the revolution in the summer of 1969.The
Selective Service draft lottery, which gave every man born between 1944 and
1950 a draft call-up number, put an exclamation point on the year in December.
That spring, anti-war demonstrations erupted across the nation, closing Penn
State’s University Park campus for a time and resulting in the killing of four
students and wounding of nine others by the National Guard at Kent State
University in May 1970.

These
things were on my mind as I walked to the fraternity to talk about the
challenge of fraternity members living (and partying) in a residential
neighborhood.It had been a difficult
winter, marked by the British vote to leave the European Union, increased
Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war and apparent interference in the
U.S. election, which saw Donald Trump elected as the 45th President
of the United States, despite losing the popular vote by almost three million
votes.The first weeks of his tenure
were marked by a barrage of personal invective and untruths from the new
President, threats by his staff against the press, and a barrage of executive
orders and memoranda that challenged the direction of domestic policy over the
past decade. Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov
remarked that it appeared as if the world was preparing for war.It was a rocky start, to say the least.

JoanBaez, remarking on the nation-wide women’s marches that attended Donald Trump’s
inauguration, said that she “was struck by how many really
young people [attended]. When I look back at the civil rights and peace
movements, was it really this young?”She added that, in an era marked by lack of empathy, “we need to make up
for that, double-time, {with} our own empathy. That’s the only way we’re going
to make it through.”

Since
then, the world has become even more uneasy.Syria’s Russia-supported dictator, Assad, used poison gas on his own
citizens, prompting the U.S. to bomb the Syrian airfield from which the gas
attack was launched.Then, North Korea’s
dictator continued to test long-range missiles with the announced goal of
becoming able to use atomic bombs on the U.S. The United States, in turn,
announced that “all options” are open against North Korea.As Vice President Pence said this week while
on a trip to South Korea, “The era of strategic patience is over.”

These
are issues that, in all likelihood, will dominate society over—and, perhaps,
well beyond—the next four years. This will be the background against which
current fraternity members and other undergraduates will study and prepare for
their lives as leaders in our communities.This is the context that will shape their opportunities and perspectives
as they start their careers and their families.

Meanwhile,
the party culture remains very much alive at Penn State. According to the February 6 issue of the Daily Collegian, (http://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/crime_courts/article_43f7a172-ecae-11e6-ad82-27f9e0f0b322.html
) eleven
rapes were reported in the first month of the spring semester. Then, in March,
a young student died as the result of a fall during drunken hazing at a
fraternity.The University closed that
fraternity and put restrictions on the others. However, during “parent week,” most
of the fraternities disobeyed one or more of the nine restrictions imposed by
the President (one disobeyed all nine).It
remains to be seen what the university will do in response.

Meanwhile,
what should the community—the full-time residents among whom the fraternities
operate—say to these young men?What are
our expectations of privileged young men who are seeking credentials to lead
our businesses, professions, and communities?What are our expectations for how the university should prepare them for
leadership and citizenship?

Not
since the 1960s has the public had so strong a need to be engaged in society,
to challenge assumptions and to demand standards.We stand on the very edge of civilization, a
time when a 33-year-old bully from North Korea and a 70-year-old bully from the
U.S. hold nuclear destruction—and our fate—in their grasp. The lesson of the 20th
century should have been that destroying life is not the way to peace.The goal of “strategic patience” was to avoid
war by creating room for more civil change to take place.As Wendell Berry wrote in response to the
Boston Marathon murders, “The solution, many times more complex and difficult,
would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace
and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth” (Our Only World, p. 19).

My
message to the fraternity men is simple.This is your world, your future.If there is a war, you are the ones who will fight and die in it.If there is peace, you will be the generation
of leaders who sustain it.Either way, you
will live out the result. Peace requires constant care, vigilance, empathy for
the struggles of others, and involvement in the community.It requires constant awareness of how our
actions affect others.I encourage you
to turn down your music, set down your bottles, and listen, instead, to your
world.Then, act accordingly.

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About Me

For the past four decades, I have been involved in media-based distance
education at Penn State and the University of Maryland University
College. I am a 2010 Sloan Consortium Fellow and a 2004 inductee into
the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. In 2009,
I received the Prize of Excellence for Lifetime Contributions to the
Field by the International Council for Open and Distance Education.